operating system not found

The other day I tried to boot up my laptop and I got a message "operating system not found" which freaked me out. I had recently started using the laptop wirelessly at my home(was using a lan line before) and it was working fine. I dunno what I coulda did to make the operating system disappear.

After multiple trys I decided to install Ubuntu OS (with little success) and it would't complete the installation, so I removed the disk. Then, the Windows XP OS suddenly booted and the pc worked fine for the day.

Little later, it ramdomly shut down (this laptop has never shut down before, it's a compaq, few years old and a hand me up from my nephew last year) and I got the blue screen which said, Kernal_Stack_Inpage_Error, there was also a message in red that said, Hard drive not installed. If operatiing system not found, re-install hard drive. Hit any key to exit.

Then, after some reboots I got a message that said, Invalid Checksum. System Halted.

Is there anything I can do to resolve this problem and any more information I should include?

OS found

Hey, thanks for the reply, I now have the linux live cd. and, by the way, the problem with the laptop was (sounds silly, and it is) that I or my wife had somehow caused the hard drive to come open (believe it or not, I had no idea where my hard drive even was on this laptop I got, I know now)

anyway, after panicing the other day, i had tried to use the live cd to install ubuntu and it didnt work (because the hard drive wasnt fully inside the laptop) so I like placed my hand on the left side of the laptop. I felt something there like the battery or something and it was a little out of it's slot. so, I kinda pulled at it a little and it came out. When I looked at it, I noticed (because it was written in big bright letters) that it was the hard drive. I laughed (at myself) and then placed the hard drive securly into it's slot, waa laa, back to normal.

That sounds like a second hard drive in a PCIMA slot on the side of the laptop. The main hard drive is usually inside the laptop, but as you said, you got it second hand- so who knows? When you go to My Computer, how many drives and how big are they?

hard drive

well, the laptop is running fine. it's a compaq, presario 1700.
in my computer it says the hard drive is 5.58mb (small, but as a hand me up, it works for now, gonna buy a new laptop soon). i also found out that the hard drive model is Hitachi_DK233AA60 (if that helps).

anyway, I aint gonna tinker with it at all for now, just had that small mishap I mentioned and now having no problems with it. It's running fine using a wi-fi adapter and actually it's kinda fast most of the time.

& Desktop PC keeps rebooting

haha, opps' yeah. I meant to say 5.58Gb. and for the recent week the laptop has been running fine.

However, my desktop keeps rebooting. it does quite fine for some hours and then does quite poorly other times after minutes.

i tried to fix it using the info from Jesper's site about changing the intelppm value to 4, but I couldn't find intelppm after I ran regedit, so i couldn't change it. Is there some other way to locate intelppm?

do you know of a way to uninstall XP sp3 and go back to XP sp2?

and one last thing I should mention. when the desktop reboots, I keep getting a message that says
Machine_Check_Exception stop: 0x0000009c

how do I fix that?

tothemack

Last edited by tothemack; 04-27-2009 at 07:36 PM.
Reason: left something out